“No,” Peter replied, reeling back from the edge. He was looking at Frances. Looking at the buttons between her legs. “I can’t figure out the mechanism.”

“You surprise me. I think you know an awful lot about machines…”

Peter looked at her. “I can make them sing,” he whispered.

The golden robot took his hand. “Do you think you could make me sing?”

Judy looked at Frances. She hadn’t said those words. She was doing something to her body, to her voice. Judy knew that robots played with humans, that they could influence their emotions and reactions, but she had never really seen it happen so overtly.

“What’s at the edge of the galaxy, Peter?” she asked again. Beneath the veneer of that white face, she was flesh and blood, and she too was responding to whatever Frances was doing to Peter. It was distracting her. “What’s out there, Peter?”

“I don’t know…but you hear things. I was marooned on that planet for three months. I was…It gives you a different perspective. We live with the EA, and we’re robbed of our volition, but in a kind way. At least we are left with the illusion of free will. Down there on that planet, I was fixed in place by total observation. No illusions-just me and that insane security net looking down at me all the time. Nowhere to hide. I suppose it was just like what I did to those people in that pirate processing space.”

Judy was biting back bile; black bubbles of oily goo were expanding in her stomach, rising up her throat. Black bubbles were spilling from Peter’s mouth. None of it real. All the bad things that needed to be said.

“Is it true?” she asked. “Do you really claim to understand what you did?”

“He’s telling the truth,” Frances said, and she sat down on the floor in front of Peter and opened her legs. This is what sex is all about, she said. This is the essence. Never mind the window dressing, the curve of a neck or the sight of a nipple, pink and erect with excitement, the smell of…

Judy shook her head, trying to disentangle what was real from the piped stream of MTPH.

But what is real, Judy? Your extra senses give you another window on reality-or is that a window to another reality? I can see in infrared, or track your passage through the disturbance of magnetic fields. Which is the “real” view?

“Frances, is that you?” Judy asked.

…because I’ve removed the physicality from sex, Peter. With me you get to just concentrate on the mental. My body is smooth and cold. You can’t arouse yourself on anything but my mind. Sex is reduced to nothing more than pressing a series of buttons-but you’d be amazed at the variety that I still experience. Do you think that you’re up to it, Peter? All you can do is enter numbers. Can you tease me? Can you arouse me that way, just by using your mind? Can we have foreplay?

“No, Frances,” Judy murmured to herself, “that’s you. There’s somebody else in here, Frances. Who is it?”

No. Who are you, Judy? If only you knew. You dream of a hand, over your face…

“How do you know that?”

Frances and Peter hadn’t moved. Frances wasn’t sitting on the floor, her legs open and knees pulled up. She wasn’t drawing Peter’s hand towards herself, gently shaping his fingers to press the numbered buttons. All I’m feeling is Peter’s emotions, Judy thought. She’s drawing him out as part of the investigation. Or maybe I’m picking up on the edge of his attraction. Oh, it’s powerful. I can feel an aching…

“I can’t feel anyone else here,” Frances said. She paused. “What about that stealth robot-Chris?”

“It doesn’t feel like him,” Judy said.

“It wouldn’t,” Frances said patiently. “He’s a stealth robot.”

Judy forced herself to her feet.

“Peter, those people in the processing space. Why did you do it?”

Peter turned to look at her. He had an erection; she could see it, bulging through his trousers. He didn’t seem embarrassed by it. He licked his lips and looked at Frances.

“You want the truth? I don’t know if you’ll understand. My name is Onethirteen. You know what that means. My great-grandmother was company property, raised from an aborted fetus. As an aborted fetus she was legally dead, therefore not human, therefore she was company property. The Transition put a stop to that sort of thing, but that wasn’t all it stopped. We also lost something valuable on the way.”

“What?” Frances asked. “Surely that sort of legal indenture is wrong.”

“It was. Or I think it was. But that’s the point. You see, there used to be a debate about whether what the companies were doing was right or wrong. Now there is no debate. The EA says how it should be, and we all just go along with it. How can we be good or bad when there is no choice? I wanted to do something for myself.”

“How childish,” Judy said.

“I know. I wanted to be fat, or an alcoholic or something, but the Watcher won’t let me.”

“You’re pathetic.” The words were out before she could stop them. The room was turning around and around. Judy was feeling annoyed; her emotions were leaking out.

“You of all people should understand,” Peter said. “You chose to remain a virgin…Look, I’m not making excuses. I’m just explaining how I felt back then. I remember…”

He paused, and the whole room held its breath, the walls spasming out, the air suddenly stilled. MTPH again, thought Judy. I’m hyperaware. I’m imagining things that are not there. This is significant. Somebody wants me thinking like this. Someone has spiked my pills to make me invest this scene with significance. Who could have done it? Is it really Chris? Is it really him I can feel in here?

“What do you remember, Peter?” It was Frances who had spoken; she felt it, too.

Peter spoke quickly. “I…Who makes all these choices? Is it the Watcher? I think so. Why is our world the shape that it is? I used to know someone, he was so bitter… He was the pilot on the Rocinante, the Private Network’s ship. He had this theory about capacity.”

“Capacity?” asked Frances.

“Oh, yes,” Peter said. “Look at me: balding, weak heart. I have to exercise or I get really unwell. Look at the pilot. He was in his sixties, then. He’ll be a really old man now, if he’s still alive. Why is that? Why do we still get old? Can’t the Watcher cure us?”

“I don’t know,” Judy said.

Peter waved his hand. “There is a theory about the maximum amount of information that can be stored in a given space. It’s all to do with entropy and black holes. Apparently a one-centimeter black hole represents ten to the power of sixty-six bits of data.”

“So?” Frances said.

“So how much capacity does a personality construct require in a processing space? Don’t answer that, Frances. I once tried to work out how many PCs the universe could contain, given the upper limit on information that could be represented therein. I tried to work out how long it would take before we filled it, given our current rate of expansion.”

“And how long was that?”

“A few thousand years. I don’t know. I didn’t believe it. But then I remembered the lessons from school. How, since the Transition, the Watcher has restricted us in our wish to expand. We don’t take over planets as we please anymore. My theory is that the Watcher has also restricted our lifespan. We live an average of seventy years. That’s less than a Westerner could expect at the start of the twenty-first century! We have been told that it is necessary, that even personality constructs should suffer imaginary ailments in order that they feel human. I think it is just another way of restricting human expansion.”

Frances remained silent. Judy could read the conviction in Peter as he spoke. “You really believe that, don’t you?” she said.

“Oh, yes, but that’s not all David used to say.”

“David?”

“David Schummel, the pilot of the Rocinante. He’d been around. When he was younger, he went to the edge of another galaxy.”